Voice to Text for Salespeople

Dictate CRM notes, follow-up emails, proposals, and call summaries in seconds. Steno turns your voice into text inside any app on your Mac, so you can spend more time selling and less time typing.

All use cases

The Admin Tax on Selling Time

Sales professionals are paid to sell, but research consistently shows they spend only 30 to 35 percent of their time on actual selling activities. The rest goes to administrative tasks, with CRM updates, email correspondence, and internal reporting consuming the largest share. Every minute spent typing a call note into Salesforce is a minute not spent on the phone with a prospect. Every hour spent crafting follow-up emails is an hour not spent closing deals.

The math is brutal. An average sales rep makes 40 to 60 calls per day and sends 30 to 50 emails. Each call should generate a CRM note. Each meaningful conversation should trigger a follow-up email. If typing a call note takes two minutes and a follow-up email takes five minutes, the documentation overhead for a single productive call is seven minutes. Across 15 substantive conversations per day, that is nearly two hours spent typing instead of selling.

The consequence is predictable: CRM data goes stale because reps skip updates, follow-up emails get delayed or sent with generic templates, and opportunities fall through the cracks because nobody documented the next steps. The problem is not laziness. The problem is that the typing overhead makes proper documentation impractical at the pace sales demands.

Pain point: CRM notes that never get written. After a busy day of calls, the last thing any sales rep wants to do is spend 30 minutes typing call summaries into the CRM. So they don't. Pipelines become inaccurate, managers lose visibility, and deals stall because critical details were never recorded. Dictating each note in 20 seconds right after the call eliminates the backlog entirely.
Pain point: Follow-up emails that arrive too late. Speed to follow-up is one of the strongest predictors of deal progression. But when a personalized follow-up requires five minutes of typing, it gets pushed to the end of the day or the next morning. By then, the prospect's attention has moved on. Dictating a personalized follow-up in 45 seconds means it arrives while the conversation is still fresh.
Pain point: Proposal and quote narratives. Many deals require custom proposals with narrative sections explaining the value proposition, use cases, and implementation approach. These sections take the longest to write and are often copied from templates without personalization. Dictating custom narrative produces more persuasive proposals in a fraction of the time.
Pain point: Internal reporting and forecasting notes. Sales managers need written context behind forecast numbers, deal stage changes, and pipeline movements. Typing these updates feels like overhead that does not help close deals. Dictating a quick explanation for each deal update takes seconds and keeps management informed without stealing selling time.

How Steno Fits Into a Salesperson's Workflow

Post-Call CRM Updates

The moment you hang up the phone, click into the CRM notes field, hold the Steno hotkey, and speak what happened: who you spoke with, what they said, what the next steps are, and when to follow up. Release and the note appears. Twenty seconds per call, done right after it happens, while every detail is fresh. Your CRM stays accurate without effort.

Personalized Follow-Up Emails

After a discovery call or demo, dictate a follow-up that references specific pain points the prospect mentioned, the features you discussed, and the agreed next steps. This level of personalization is what separates closers from average reps, and dictation makes it practical to do for every single conversation. The speed of voice means personalization no longer costs you time.

Proposal Narrative Sections

When building a proposal, dictate the executive summary, value proposition, and use case sections. Speak as if you were presenting to the prospect. The result is persuasive, conversational copy that reads better than formal typed business writing. Steno works in Google Docs, Word, or directly in your proposal tool.

Slack and Team Communication

Sales teams communicate constantly via Slack or Teams. Dictating updates about deal progress, competitive intelligence, or customer feedback is faster than typing and produces more detailed updates. Steno works directly in Slack, Teams, and any messaging platform on your Mac. The instant transcription makes it feel seamless.

Typing vs. Voice: A Real Comparison

Consider the daily written output of an active sales rep. Here is what the documentation workload looks like with typing versus voice dictation.

TaskTypingVoice with Steno
CRM call notes (15 calls)30 minutes5 minutes
Follow-up emails (8 emails)40 minutes8 minutes
Internal deal updates15 minutes3 minutes
Proposal sections (1 deal)30 minutes8 minutes
Total per day~115 minutes~24 minutes
Total per week~9.5 hours~2 hours

Seven and a half hours per week returned to selling. Over a quarter, that is nearly 100 hours. At any reasonable close rate, those reclaimed selling hours translate directly to additional revenue. The time savings calculator can help you estimate the exact impact on your quota.

Why Salespeople Choose Steno

Sales reps need tools that work instantly and everywhere. Steno sits in the Mac menu bar, always available. Hold a key, speak, release. It works in Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Slack, and every other application because it inserts text at the system level via the macOS Accessibility API. No browser extensions, no CRM plugins, no IT tickets required.

The 30-second setup means a new rep can install Steno and start using it before their first call of the day. There is no training, no configuration, and no learning curve. If you can talk to prospects, you already know how to use Steno.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Steno work with Salesforce, HubSpot, and other CRMs?

Yes. Steno inserts text wherever your cursor is on your Mac using the macOS Accessibility API. It works with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, Zoho, and any CRM you access through a web browser or desktop application. No integrations or plugins needed. Just click into a notes field and dictate.

Can I dictate personalized follow-up emails quickly?

Absolutely. After a call or meeting, hold the Steno hotkey and speak a personalized follow-up referencing specific points discussed, next steps, and any commitments made. The email appears in your mail client in seconds. Personalized follow-ups that take five minutes to type take under a minute to dictate.

How does Steno help with CRM hygiene?

The number one reason CRM data goes stale is that updating it takes too long. When logging a call note requires two minutes of typing, sales reps skip it. With Steno, the same note takes 20 seconds to dictate. When updating the CRM is nearly effortless, it actually gets done consistently, and your pipeline data stays accurate.

Is prospect and deal information secure?

Steno sends audio to a transcription API over encrypted connections. No recordings or transcripts are stored on any server after processing. Audio is discarded immediately after transcription. No prospect names, deal values, or confidential sales information is retained by Steno.

Sell More, Type Less

Join thousands of professionals who have reclaimed hours from documentation. Steno is free to download for Mac.

Download Steno Free